February 8, 2011

When the University of California, Berkeley, announced it was eliminating five varsity teams last fall, the decision was sold as a necessary sacrifice by a university reeling from severe cuts in state aid.

Four months later, the university finds itself in a dilemma caused by a largely overlooked consequence of that decision. The cutting of two women’s teams — lacrosse and gymnastics — threw the Cal athletic department out of compliance with the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX. Without the five teams, the university, based on numbers it provided, will have to add 50 spots for women and eliminate 80 spots for men to meet Title IX requirements. That is in addition to the more than 100 male athletes already cut when men’s rugby, baseball and gymnastics were dropped as varsity sports, or about the equivalent of two football squads.

Wait a minute, did that say women's lacrosse? How many guys in California play lacrosse, much less girls? One thing I can say for sure is that a lot more boys in California play baseball, one of the other eliminated sports, than girls in California play lacrosse. Yet, the NYT isn't running an article about Cal cutting baseball.

Also, what fraction of female lacrosse players in California come from below the upper middle class? I wouldn't be surprised if 25% of female lacrosse players in California are the daughters of fathers who went to East Coast prep schools. Probably 20% are daughters of fathers who went to East Coast prep schools who don't have sons.

The hotbed of girl's lacrosse in Southern California appears to be coastal Orange County: all those communities with Spanish names like San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo, and San Clemente, which shows they don't have many Spanish names among the players, unlike, say, Garfield and Roosevelt High Schools in East L.A., which don't play girl's lacrosse.

I asked my son if he knows anybody who plays lacrosse. The only person he knows who plays lacrosse is the son of a division president of a Fortune 100 company. Nice kid. Nice family. Good blood, good bone. They make the Bushes look like Jukes.

I was going to say that girl's lacrosse skews dramatically higher up the social scale in California than boy's baseball. But, now that I think about it, I don't know if that's hugely true anymore because baseball seems to be an expensive sport too. The casual days when a Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams could come out of sandlot ball in California are receding. Now, everybody except basketball players and football players seems to need to be on a "travel squad."

Back to Title IX. You might say: Yes, but boys like sports more than girls do. Well, sure. But disparate impact trumps common sense. So, you aren't supposed to say that.

Until now, Cal had been fulfilling Title IX requirements by asserting that it met the “interests and abilities” of its female students, one of three so-called prongs that institutions can choose to comply with the law. When a university cuts even one women’s team, it can no longer rely on that claim, nor can it argue that it has a history of expanding opportunities for women, which is another option for compliance. Now, Cal has effectively backed itself into a corner and is left with only the third option — proving that female participation in athletics is proportionate to female undergraduate enrollment in the university.

By that measure, Cal falls considerably short. Just 40 percent of the 965 participants on the university’s varsity teams were women in the 2009-10 academic year; its overall student enrollment was 53 percent female. To comply with Title IX, officials have said they plan to trim male rosters while expanding the size of female teams, a practice known in college athletics as roster management.... Mellis said that by next fall, the department planned to limit its male rosters to a total of 377, and to expand the female participants to 393.

In a lot of ways, American college sports are a big waste of time and money, but one thing that you can say for them is that people really care about winning at them. So it goes to show you how powerful the theory of disparate impact is that it has so much power over something as sacred in American society as college sports.

I've long understood that the underlying premise of Title IX is that federally funded universities shouldn't be "giving" benefits to male athletes disproportionately. If that's the case, then why should athletic scholarships in the revenue generating sports (i.e. men's basketball and football) be counted for Title IX purposes? Those athletes aren't being given anything--they're generating net profit to the university.

I'd just like to add that I rediscovered on a recent trip to England that in the UK, lacrosse is reserved entirely for girls--just as field hockey is in this country. I'd forgotten that, but surely there are doctoral dissertations out there about these phenomena.

This nonsense has been going on since the 1990's, and every round of scholarship reductions happens dis-proportionally to male sports. I remember a debate I once saw on ESPN's show Outside the Lines ( Hosted by one of the handful of real journalists left at ESPN, Bob Ley ) and in it the hardcore Title IX supporters were whining about men's football and basketball receiving "preferential treatment" from universities and using this obvious fact to argue that that was the reason that less popular men's sports like gymnastics and wrestling were hacked to pieces and not the draconian Title IX edicts from government educrats.

Well needless to say about half the program was spent discussing this imaginary issue until a former college men's gymnastics coach who was of Asian American ancestry pointed out that over 70% of the men's programs killed by Title IX up until that time were in fact at non-Division I schools, schools that very rarely have big money men's football and basketball programs. This inconvenient fact though almost never sees the light of day because it is considered you guessed it, politically incorrect.

Why can't cheerleading be counted? As I see it, it has the prerequisites to be considered a sport.Competitions up to the national level: CheckPhysically demanding: CheckProduces lots of injuries, some of them career-ending: CheckHas been on ESPN and similar networks: Check

Although womens basketball is really pointless, the womens' softball, volleyball, and gymnastics teams have as big of an audience as any minor male sports. Most people would probably prefer to watch womens gymnastics (which has a lot of aesthetic and athletic value) over mens' wrestling or rowing. And college sports are not pointless, especially not mens' basketball and football. They generate tons of money for the universities, and successful sports teams can raise the school's national profile. Also it gives students something to do, and something to bond over. Yeah, they are pretty pointless for some rinkydink liberal arts college, but they are an essential part of university life at any large state university.

Serious question that sounds like snark: how many lesbian coaches have been hired mainly because of Title IX, and what has their impact been on the campus climate? Do coaches have faculty senate votes?

I was hugely surprised when I found out that in America, lacrosse is not a girls' game. I had only heard of it from my sister's Enid Blyton books, where the girls of Mallory Towers or wherever would be regularly off to play lacrosse.

1. Title IX is not about scholarships but about participation. A Division I baseball team has 24 players but only gets nine scholarships that can be split between the players. Thus, one of the problems that football causes for Title IX compliance is walk-ons.

2. Cheerleaders and dance teams cannot be used to show compliance. Several universities (I remember Oklahoma in particular) tried to have the cheerleaders count. The Department of Education said no.

3. Football and men's basketball teams do not make any money for the universities. Football and Men's basketball can generate income that is used by the Athletic Department to fund other teams and pay capital expenses.

4. At most universities, the Athletic Department is a separate, not-for-profit corporation that is not really controlled by the university.

5. Sports does little not raise the profile of a university. Northwest, Vanderbilt, Rice are still in the US NEWS top 25 national universities even though their sports programs are not very good. The University of Memphis did not benefit academically by being in a Final Four.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but in central Virginia youth lacrosse has a respectably sized and growing presence among the merely middle class. I thought this might be a national trend, but based on what Steve says about California I must be wrong. That's a shame, in my opinion it's a hell of a lot more fun than baseball!

Most people would probably prefer to watch womens gymnastics (which has a lot of aesthetic and athletic value) over mens' wrestling or rowing...

And college sports are not pointless, especially not mens' basketball and football. They generate tons of money for the universities, and successful sports teams can raise the school's national profile. Also it gives students something to do, and something to bond over. Yeah, they are pretty pointless for some rinkydink liberal arts college, but they are an essential part of university life at any large state university.

Woman's gymnastics is OK to watch, but wrestling is on the rise. Wrestling is now the core foundation for MMA champions and MMA is the fastest growing sport, the 4th most popular among 18-34yr men, and the only sport to grow both general and hard core fanbase in the past 3yrs.

Universities and colleges would probably net benefit by branding but outsourcing all college athletics as club sports as has happened already to many college sports: entertaining diversion, tribal loyalty, raised profile, etc. without the costs, distractions and corruption of their main mission.

Disparate impact is communism, plain and simple. I think the vast majority of the public has no idea that civil rights laws work this way. For example, Home Depot had to pay out over $100 million in a class action gender discrimination lawsuit because the tiling, plumbing, and electrical salesmen were disproportionately made up of men, while the majority of cashiers were women. How is that a civil rights issue?This could be a winning issue for a political party if they proposed going back to the disparate treatment interpretation of the law.

Actually a few months ago the issue of whether cheerleading fell under Title IX definition of "sport" was brought before a federal district court. Frankly I felt that the decision was incorrect but I am not sure it is going to be appealed.

"I don't know about the rest of the country, but in central Virginia youth lacrosse has a respectably sized and growing presence among the merely middle class. I thought this might be a national trend, but based on what Steve says about California I must be wrong. That's a shame, in my opinion it's a hell of a lot more fun than baseball!"

Lacrosse is becoming more popular in Ohio too. It used to be the preserve of small colleges, then private high schools, but in the last couple of years has moved all the way into many middle schools, including girls teams.

Lacrosse is not reserved to girls in the UK, although it's probably more commonly played by girls. At my university there were mens', womens', and mixed lacrosse teams. Mens' lacrosse was notorious for the number of injuries the players suffered.

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance"

The problem is that in the banana republic we call the USA, the law is whatever judges say it and NOT what the legislature writes. All this "disparate impact" BS comes from the fevered minds of our black-robed judicial masters.

1. Title IX is not about scholarships but about participation. A Division I baseball team has 24 players but only gets nine scholarships that can be split between the players. Thus, one of the problems that football causes for Title IX compliance is walk-ons. only partially correct you cannot give 100 men's atheletic scholarships and 50 women's. Also a woman's softball field must be in equal condition to a men's ect.

This could be a winning issue for a political party if if we had a real democracy perhaps, but when you have a rotten elite and rotten politicized judiciary it doesn't much matter. They do what they want. Just look at anti-Christianity in the UK - even anglican schools are forced to accept less anglican students and more muslims and not have Christmas trees, etc. They don't even care about the stupidity of their lies - even in Europe elites in the UK and France are pushing the "We;ve always been a nation of immigrants" idea.The elite HAVE to go. That's the only solution.

The cutting of two women’s teams — lacrosse and gymnastics — threw the Cal athletic department out of compliance with the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX.

It's not a "law"; the executive branch treats it as a bill of attainder that the bureacracy uses to attain the property of anyone it wants. If it were a "law", it would be used to redress the imbalance in overall enrollment at many colleges where women outnumber men. It would be used to redress the imbalance between whites and blacks on the football and basketball teaams. And on and on.

Most commenters are assuming thatTitle IX has something to do with sports. It doesn't:

(a) Prohibition against discrimination; exceptions. No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance, except that....

Yes, after all Marx devoted three whole chapters of Das Kapital to the importance of female sports, and Lenin made women's basketball a central theme of the Bolshevik Revolution."marxist" in the sense of cultural Frankfort school marxism; and yes they devoted a whole lot of time to issues like these- and doing everything they could demoralize and undermine society. Hitler kicked them out and we got them.

I don't know about other dudes, but I'd rather watch women's sports. Call me crazy, I just like looking at chicks more than looking at dudes.

Ummmmm... watching women's college sports does not help you see attractive women, if that's what you're driving at... female college athletes are generally a lot less attractive than the average 18 year-old college female since female athletes are shaped a lot bigger and more broad than the average college girl.

You're better off just parking yourself at the main quad of your local college to do your ogling...

1. many universities actually have more women on scholarship than men because male athletes are more likely to walk onto a team.

2. Playing on a college sports team is not a great deal for many of the athletes. Many of them get no scholarship or on a partial scholarship. Remember the Duke Lacrosse team has 45 members but only a couple were on scholarship. Playing a sport limits what one can major in and gives the coaching staff a tremendous amount of power.

If parents just put the money spent on camps, travel teams, and equipment into a college fund, most kids would be better off.

Playing sports so that a students can major in general studies at Michigan is a waste of time.

Yep. In general, college sports ought to be given very little more importance than intramural sports. Some guys like to play football on their own time; others like to wrestle, or play basketball. Some girls like to play soccer, or basketball, or softball. Great! The world is a better place for the diversity of interests, and it's good to keep in shape.

But it's nuts to treat those things as somehow important and relevant to the college experience, which is hopefully about giving the smart people in this society a chance to benefit from access to a vast amount of concentrated knowledge, including genuine experts in various subjects available to teach interested students.

Athletic scholarships and admissions make no sense at all. At the high end, most of the people who are using college teams as semipro teams, trying to make it to the pros, are either not college material, or at least aren't capable of getting through college with the equivalent of a full-time physically demanding job on the side. At the low end, okay, I'm glad you like lacrosse or the javelin, but that isn't much of a reason to give you an admissions boost.

Ummm... I'm a young woman with a dream of a Mickey Mouse MA or, perhaps even, a Mickey Mouse Ph.D.To have some sort of a chance at some sort of an academic employment afterwards, I guess, I'd have to attend an elite school. So... Are you saying that I would be a lot more attractive as an applicant, if I half heartedly picked up a sport at a community center somewhere? I won't have to be good, right? Will merely IDENTIFYING as an athlete in whatever low profile team they need to staff do the trick?

Speaking of identifying self; what exactly prevents people from proclaiming themselves a certain race? From what I understand, a person's stated race is a lie only if he believes it to be a lie. As long as the proud individual can look the accuser straight in the eye, fill both lungs with air and act all kinds of offended, ("Let me tell you something! When I go out there every morning, when I go out into the world, I present myself as a PROUD WOMAN OF COLOR. It's not my job to look a certain way just to please you or to confirm your views of what my people should or shouldn't look like! I CANNOT BELIEVE that in this day and age, something as deeply personal as HERITAGE is still just a matter of coloring to some people! Were you there when my grandmother instilled our values in me? Do you even know what our values are?"), nothing can be done to confirm fraud. Light skinned, green eyed, 1/16 black people claim to be Black all the time. "Identity" trumps biology in this game. Why aren't you all claiming minority status? If you always put down "white", your kid can claim that you were ashamed of great-grandma Bessie, but he isn't and never will be!

This would be a good excuse for the government to require universities to divorce themselves of sports programs all together and stick to being academic institutions. Would solve several problems, including title IX issues and also complaints about the affirmative action of bringing in athletes with SAT scores 400 points below the average student. Then again, this would lead to more racial disparate impact...

I suppose I could mention Jennie Finch, Natalie Coughlin, or the UCLA women's gymnastics team, but how about if I just throw out the name of Alison Stokke FTW?sigh.. I miss college.. I have spent the rest of my life missing college.

"Out of curiousity, do colleges outside the us typically have big sports teams/events?"

No. It's a freakish abnormality limited pretty much to the USA exclusively.

In England for instance you have university affiliated sports clubs but they are actual clubs, not athletic departments. You have things like the traditional Oxford vs. Cambridge rowing race on the Thames, but that's just a traditional event, it isn't something designed to make money and no one gets a scholarship for being on the rowing team.

Oxford, Cambridge and other universities and colleges may have football (soccer, rugby, etc) clubs, but they compete in amateur leagues, mostly against non-collegiate, non-university clubs, not against other university or college teams. It's a spare time activity for students; no one goes to university to be an athlete.

In Latin America you have soccer clubs that started out as university teams (UNAM in Mexico, Liga de Quito in Ecuador, Universitario in Peru, etc) but which now are fully professional teams which may or may not have some connection with a university (apart from their shared name and history). They play with professional players, not with students. They are professional sports clubs and in no sense are they like university athletic departments in the USA.

Sport outside the USA tends to be club based, not academically based. Students don't get sports scholarships. No one cares about or watches student athletes to any large degree. Students may play sports, but mostly on their own time with their own money, and it isn't something that school administrators or politicians or judges spend much time worrying about.

Women's lacrosse is actually a different sport than men's lacrosse; men's lacrosse developed in North America as a men's game, 10 players a side, smaller field, lots of physical contact. Women's lacrosse developed in Europe, in Britain IIRC, as a women's game with 12 players a side, a larger field (with no outer boundary), and much less physical contact.

It is somewhat the reverse to what happened with field hockey; field hockey rules are pretty much the same between the men's and women's game, but field hockey was introduced into the USA as a women's game, and Americans still tend to think of it as a women's game, with disastrous results for the men's game inside the USA. Outside the USA/Canada, field hockey has always been a men's game; women's field hockey came later. Field hockey is still a pretty major sport in many parts of Europe and Asia; it's just called "hockey" in fact, "field" hockey is an American disambiguation.

Steve, it should be pointed out that the elimination of men's rugby at UC Berkeley is an especially stark injustice as that is one of the oldest university sports programs in existence; Cal was playing rugby long before it adopted American gridiron football. The Big Game match between Cal and Stanford used to be a rugby match, not a game of gridiron football.

One of the two or three most famous plays in college football history, Cal's five lateral kickoff runback on the last play of the 1982 game versus Stanford that ended with a Cal player running over a Stanford trombone player, was possible because the Cal coach put all his rugby players on the field. So, rugby has deep roots at Cal.

sigh.. I miss college.. I have spent the rest of my life missing college.

Tell me about it.

We were pretty good swimmers, back in the day, but we certainly weren't NCAA Div I caliber athletes by any means [and let's be real here - who the hell is?], so instead me & my buddies used to lifeguard at the outdoor pool, where we got to know the chicks on the women's swimming team and the women's diving team pretty well.

And, of course, the occasional drop-dead gorgeous chick from the women's gymnastics team or the women's track-n-field team, who happened to saunter by for a dip in the pool.

Anonymous: They said "Marxist"; they didn't say Karl Marx. Go read up on the Frankfurt School, you big dope, before you foolishly accuse others of ignorance or stupidity.

Hey look, Mr. "Anonymous," I'm actually somewhat aware of the "Frankfurt School." But remember it closed up shop around 75 years ago, although a handful of its adherents remained leftists and radicals of one sort or another after they moved to America. And the commenter-fools I was quoting said "marxist society" and "communism." Whether women's lacrosse is really a central feature of these is the issue in question. If so, then I suppose that Sarah Palin must be a hardcore "Marxist-Communist."

Here's an analogy. Lots of the neocons trace their intellectual roots to Trotskyism, but they either abandoned Trotskyism around 1950 or it was their parents or even their grandparents who did so. And the Trotskyite connection to their ignorant puppets like Bush and his friends is even more attenuated. So while it's perfectly fine to make political jokes about the Bush Administration being Trotskyite-America, anyone who takes that statement literally is just an ignorant moron, since I doubt a single Bush policy had anything to do with Trotsky's views on collectivizing agriculture or seizing factories. Since Sarah Palin's advisors are also all neocons, maybe she should be called a "Trotskyite" also...

It's a lot like that ridiculous term "Islamo-Fascist." Basically, the neocons don't like Islam and they don't like Fascism, and since (obviously) all their numerous enemies are part of a unified conspiracy, they lump them together as Islamo-Fascists. Similarly, rightwingers don't like Feminism and they don't like Marxism and they don't like Communism, so they tend to lump their dislikes together. Since they also don't like Islam, I suppose some of them go around denouncing Islamo-Feminist-Marxists. Or maybe Gay-Islamo-Feminist-Marxists...

Bush Administration being Trotskyite-America, anyone who takes that statement literally is just an ignorant moronkind of like what you did with cultural marxism? I am the 'moron' who used that term.are part of a unified conspiracy but don't recall saying or implying this...That said, you are probably gleefully unaware of how much 'marxist theory' has effected, for example, the liberal arts. Most samplings (and its pretty easy to tell by the fruits of scholarship and school policies) show professors to not only be overwhelmingly left but far left, and they enforce an orthodoxy. How? I don't know. I don't think there is a secret communist shadow government or illumanti, or whatever, but for whatever reason, the sixties revolution which was indeed a cultural marxism, was a well funded well backed triumph over WASP america.

Going back to the neocons. Yes, it would be silly to say they are Trotskyites, but do they have an orthodoxy they enforce? How did they suddenly achieve it? How did they pretty much take over the Republican party and 'mainstream' conservative journals like the national review? How have they managed, with great success, to filter nearly every republican candidate (with the exception of local congress races, where its a bit harder) to adhere to neocon, not paleocon ideas? is it because their ideas are better? Well we know better than that, don't we?Am I a "moron" "conspiracy theorist' for pointing this out?

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